PONDERING

Joel Weishaus

 

Good afternoon Joel.

The pond appears to be part of native wetlands which acts, amongst several other things, as regional detention. In short, floodplain/wetland areas are mostly required to remain untouched. My educated guess would be that these wetland areas could have become more 'pond like' with the construction of the roads that intersect them. The culverts may have slowed the wetland stream and created what exists today. (1)

 

 

Around 300 million years ago an amphibious being emerged from the primeval waters, walked on muddy alien ground, and began the long evolution that eventually led to who we are today, the status of the planet we inhabit, and to a pond on which ducks peacefully eat, paddle, quack and reproduce. Here, too, is the unpredictable, the uncanny, the chasm between the corporeal and the dreaming human mind on whose shores humanity "poetically dwells."(2)

Two famous ponds in Literary History are Henry Thoreau's Walden Pond, and Matsuo Basho's poem: Old pond / a frog leaps in / plop!(3) While Walden Pond has become a tourist destination, Basho's nameless pond remains an enigma, a koan, a conundrum to ponder upon.

If he looked into the pond today, Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image, would see deeper, to humanity as a wavering image haunted by its myths of origination, even as its wizards are beginning to see Earth as orbiting in a universe "always at the beginning of infinity."(4)

Now poets need the vision of cosmologists, paleoanthropologists, metaphilosophers, mythologists, and for this project, hydrologists—to name but a few of the many strands, muddy though they may be, with which Pondering may angle into the deep.

 

1. Matthew Johnson, Senior Planner / Community Development. City of Forest Grove OR. (Slightly edited)
2. Martin Heidegger quoting Friedrich Hölderlin.
3. There are many translations of Furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizo no oto.
4. David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity. New York, 2012.

-Designed to be viewed on a 13" or larger screen.

 

 

INDEX OF FIRST LINES

 


1. Think through the angles
2. Sweet scent of autumn's flowers dying
3. Bending around and leaping over

 

NOTES

For Susan, Always.

Thank You to:The University of New Mexico, Center for Southwest Research, and
Portland State University, Department of Philosophy, for your invaluable support.